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Natural Disasters?
Floods, earthquakes, landslides: 2011 is a year of disasters. Bill McKibben asks: are we to blame? Plus, survivors tell their tales
At least since Noah, and likely long before, we've stared in horror at catastrophe and tried to suss out deeper meaning – it was but weeks ago that the Tokyo governor, Shintaro Ishihara, declared that the earthquake/tsunami/ reactor tripleheader was "divine punishment" for excess consumerism. This line of reasoning usually fails to persuade these days (why are Las Vegas and Dubai unscathed by anything except the housing meltdown?) but it's persistent. We need some explanation for why our stable world is suddenly cracked in half or under water. Still, over time we've become less superstitious, since science can explain these cataclysms. Angry gods or plate tectonics? We're definitely moving towards natural explanation of crises.
Which is odd, because the physical world is moving in the other direction.
The Holocene – the 10,000 years through which we have just come – was by all accounts a period of calm and stability on Earth. Temperatures and sea levels were relatively stable. Hence it was an excellent time to build a civilisation, especially the modern kind that comes with lots of stuff: roads, buildings, container ports, nuclear reactors. Yes, we had disasters throughout those millennia, some of them (Krakatoa, say) simply enormous. Hurricanes blew, earthquakes rocked. But they were, by definition, rare, taking us by surprise – freaks, outliers, traumas that persisted in our collective history precisely because they were so unusual.
We're now moving into a new geological epoch, one scientists are calling the Anthropocene – a world remade by man, most obvious in his emissions of carbon dioxide. That CO2 traps heat near the planet that would otherwise have radiated back to space – there is, simply, more energy in our atmosphere than there used to be. And that energy expresses itself in many ways: ice melts, water heats, clouds gather. 2010 was the warmest year on record, and according to insurers – the people we task with totting up disasters – it demonstrated the unprecedented mayhem this new heat causes. Global warming was "the only plausible explanation", the giant reinsurer Munich Re explained in December, of 2010's catastrophes, the drought, heatwave and fires across Russia, and the mega-floods in Pakistan, Australia, Brazil and elsewhere were at least plausibly connected to the general heating. They were, that is to say, not precisely "natural disasters", but something more complex; the human thumb was on the scale.
We still have plenty of purely natural disasters – though scientists can posit reasons climate change might make the world more seismically active, tectonic and volcanic forces seem beyond our reach; the great wave that broke over Sendai really did come out of the blue. But even in Japan, of course, the disaster was not entirely "natural". The subsequent fallout was… fallout, the invisible plume streaming from one of our highest-tech marvels, a complex reduced in minutes into something almost elemental, a kind of utility-owned volcano.
In a sense Ishihara was correct when he decried "selfish greed". It is consumerism that has flooded the atmosphere with CO2: the constant getting and spending, where $1 spent liberates roughly 1lb of carbon. We are remaking the world, and quickly; we are stumbling into a new way of thinking about disaster, where neither God nor nature, but man is to blame.
That changes the valence of catastrophe. Since warm air holds more water vapour than cold, the atmosphere is nearly 5% moister than it was just a few decades ago. That loads the dice for great floods of the kind suddenly so common. I lived through one in my small mountain town in Vermont two summers ago: the biggest thunderstorm in our history dropped buckets of rain in a matter of hours. Our town is almost entirely intact forest; it should have been able to hold whatever nature threw at it. But that rain fell on a different planet from the one the forest had grown up on; every road washed out, and the governor had to visit by helicopter. But at least we had the solace (or self-lacerating realisation) that we'd helped cause this deep change. Americans burn more carbon per capita than just about anyone; what do you say to a Pakistani farmer watching the swollen Indus wash away his life's work? And since global warming seems to take first aim at the poorest places that have done the least to cause it, this is a question we may be asking ourselves a good deal in the decades to come.
Not every natural disaster is unnatural now, and we may be able to fool ourselves a little longer. But these days it's the climate deniers who act like the pious of yore, unable to accept the truth. I was surprised, and impressed, to read a poll of Americans taken recently. By healthy majorities, this most religious of western citizenries said natural disasters were more likely to be a sign of climate change than of God's displeasure.
Which is good news, because for the first time in human history we can prevent a great deal of unnecessary cataclysm in the years ahead. Not all of it – there will always be earthquakes and hurricanes. But every bit of carbon we keep out of the atmosphere is that much less extra energy we add to the system. It's that much less disaster waiting to happen.
Japan earthquakeMarch: Earthquake of magnitude 9.0 off the north-east coast of Japan, followed by a 15-20m high tsunami
Human cost: More than 10,000 dead; 17,000 missing
Economic cost: £189bn
Survivor's story: Taiko Sawadate, 59, nurse, Otsuchi City
When the alarms rang, I had about 20 minutes to evacuate with my mother. We drove even higher than the recommended safe area, so I was sure it was OK. Someone shouted, "It's coming" and I got out to have a look. The waters were upon us. I just about got my mother out of the car, but she tripped over. As I reached out to grab her, the tsunami swept us away. I was sure I was going to die.
It was dark in the water and I was being hit by debris on all sides. At one point, I saw an entire house coming towards me. But the surge forced me forward and suddenly up into the air and on to a slope. At last I could breathe. I really don't know how long I was in the tsunami. The whole thing probably lasted less than a minute.
Some people found me and gave me dry clothes. I dressed my own wounds. About 20 of us evacuated to a house high on one of the slopes. We found six bodies that first day and more on the second, including my mother's. It wasn't far. I wrapped it in the cleanest sheet I could find and put a stone border around it. Then I covered it with a futon, so the crows could not get at it. I said a prayer and left her there. There are so many bodies, the authorities are not sure what to do with them all.
On the second day, a fire broke out on the mountain, and we didn't have much food – just one piece of bread or one rice ball each for the day.
On the third day, the winds turned bitterly cold, so we walked for an hour to a public shelter at a school. When we arrived at Otsuchi, the city was still burning.
I have nothing left. My savings, bank book and ID cards are all washed away.
Eventually I want to move away from the coast. I feel bad about that, as my family have been here for more than five generations. But I'm too frightened to stay.
Jonathan Watts
January: Torrential rainstorms trigger mudslides in the mountainous Serrana region outside Rio de Janeiro, the worst natural disaster in the country's history.
Human cost: 916 dead; 345 missing Economic cost £187m
Survivor's story: Mauricio Berlim, 35, undertaker, Teresopolis
Only the following day did the scale of the disaster become clear. The first family came in at about 2pm – they had lost four relatives, three adults and one child. By 10pm, I was organising 50 burials.
That night, cars and vans started turning up at the city morgue with bodies inside. I stayed until 4am – the bodies never stopped arriving, there were so many desperate families trying to identify their relatives. It was madness. People couldn't find their relatives because the bodies were so dirty. It was terrible.
After two days we ran out of coffins. On the Friday I called our supplier and ordered more; we got through 175. Because there were so many dead, they moved the morgue into an old church. The bodies were laid out on long tables covered in black plastic sheets. We started using a truck instead of hearses to transport the bodies to the funeral parlour. Instead of taking one body at a time, we would take 10 or 15.
Until 20 days ago there were still bodies inside the church. Now I think there are none left. The problem now is death certificates – none has been issued yet. Many people are still missing.
Thank God, nobody in my family was killed. I have one friend who had to leave his house, because there was no water or electricity, but that was all.
The city is returning to normal, but there was no carnival this year. Every week there are protests, demanding the impeachment of the mayor. Things are confused. Many people still have nowhere to live.
In front of my office you can see one of the mountains that collapsed; one report said boulders came crashing down at 180km an hour.
My family has been in the funeral business for 106 years and no one had ever seen anything like it.Tom Phillips
Australian floodsNovember 2010-January 2011: Queensland and Victoria floods
Human cost: 37 dead, nine missing
Economic cost: £19bn – Australia's costliest natural disaster ever
Survivor's story: Ashley Hay, 40, novelist, Brisbane
The silence was vast. There were no birds singing, no cars on the roads. The only sound was the tiniest turn of water retreating across our lawn. I had left home three days earlier, on a wet day, but a normal one, and came back to find my house a little yellow island jutting out of a wide brown sea.
Two days before, our suburb had been in a frenzy. My husband reported belongings being crammed into vans, trucks, cars – anything that would hold them. The traffic jammed as it tried to get to anywhere but here. Our grass, he said, was busy with flightless insects trying to get to higher ground: leeches, cockroaches, spiders. And it rained and it rained.
We knew how high the water had crept in Brisbane's infamous 1974 flood. There were predictions of an extra metre this time. My husband took our son, some stuff, left most of what we owned, and went away.
Now, seeing our street, it was shocking. The Brisbane river had breached its banks, spilling across roads and parks, over cars and trees, to mark out a new shoreline, here, in our front garden. It was quiet and still and, the strangest thing of all, the sun was blazing down. The rain had stopped. The flood had peaked at 4.46m, a metre below the 1974 mark.
It was 13 January, and the water was ebbing towards the day's first low. Suddenly, we knew the times and heights of the tides; suddenly we were attuned to its six-and-a-half-hour rhythm. Suddenly we were seafarers, watching our neighbours launch a boat from their drive. When the water drained away – it had gone by the next day – everything that had been immersed was a strange monochrome, halfway between brown and grey, fetid and slippy.
And then it began. Taking every single thing out, piece by piece, to decide if it could be saved. It was unreasonably exhausting. We washed; we dried; we papered the lawn. And after a few days, we threw it all away. Who cares about a notebook that stinks like a sewer? Who needs a Christmas decoration that drips dark muck from hidden crevices, no matter how many times you rinse it, shake it out, pat it dry?
Around us, houses were stripped and gutted – kitchens and bathrooms reduced to soggy piles of chipboard. A third of Brisbane's annual landfill – more than 110,000 tonnes of rubbish – was dumped in a week.
The floods were almost three months ago now, and it's still too quiet. We're still the only people back on our strip. We tell ourselves we're the luckiest people around.
Ashley Hay's first novel, The Body In The Clouds, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
February: Earthquake of magnitude 6.3 hit the city of Christchurch
Human cost: 166 dead
Economic cost: £4.5bn-£6.75bn
Survivor's story: Anne Malcolm, 71, counsellor, Christchurch
I don't normally work on a Tuesday, but our counselling agency had a meeting from noon to 1pm [on the fifth floor of the Canterbury TV building]. The meeting was drawing to a close when, with no warning, the room exploded. Everything began to fly in all directions.
There had been aftershocks from the earthquake in September – we were used to the building wobbling. This was different. The explosion was sharp, jagged. Massive. I remember this sound of the structure breaking. The next thing I recall was being completely buried. I had very, very heavy masonry and beams on me.
Our floor, the top floor, came right down. There were 10 of us in the room and some rode down on the descending wall, almost surfed down with the building. Somehow the shock and adrenaline seemed to protect me, so in those first moments I didn't experience intense pain. I felt safe. I felt I would survive.
Two young policemen arrived within seconds. They clambered on to the rubble and began digging. Soon after, I was in the ambulance. I had surgery, and now I'm in a rehabilitation unit. I have only one functioning limb. I guess I'm here for at least another three to four weeks, until I can begin using these limbs again.
In hospital, I'm on the ground floor. I can't imagine going into a building that's more than one level. When the aftershocks come, my heart rate increases, but then a staff member arrives to see how you are. How I'll be when I get home, I don't know.
My local supermarket has gone, my post office has gone, my bakery has gone – everything that was part of my village life is gone.
Our much-loved computer whiz-kid, who had been with us for 10 years, died on our floor. But on every other floor in that building, it's the other way around – one or two people were rescued, but everyone else was lost. We were the fortunate ones.
Toby Manhire
January-February: Devastating floods hit the country; more rain fell in Batticaloa than it normally gets in a year
Human cost: 62 dead; 1.1 million displaced
Economic cost: £300m
Survivor's story: Milvahanam Loganadan, 40, driver, Batticalao
It was about 7.30pm and we were sitting down to watch TV when we heard people making a lot of noise in the street outside. "The water is coming," they were shouting. "It's a flood."
I didn't know what to do – we have a seven-month-old baby and a four-year-old. But even before I could get to the door, the water was coming into the house. It was rushing in, so we picked up the children, ran out and kept going until we got to higher ground.
I convinced a rickshaw driver to take the rest of my family to my wife's mother's house, which is on top of a hill. It was chaotic. There had been no warning on the television or radio, so it was totally unexpected. It had been raining, certainly, but not enough for us to think that a flood was on its way.
Once my family were safe, I went back to the house to get valuables and documents. Everything else was ruined. I checked on the neighbours. The navy and police had got to our street with boats to evacuate the ones who couldn't move themselves.
Most people moved in with relatives, but quite a lot of people ended up in camps for the displaced. Happily, there were no deaths among my friends and family, although I know other people did die. There were snakes in the water; that killed a few, I heard.
We spent a week cleaning the house and then the waters came again and we had to evacuate again, and then clean it up once more. All our furniture has gone, and my motorbike, but it could have been worse. I've got a job, which helps a lot. Most of the farmers have lost a lot of their crop and other people needed the dry rations the NGOs were handing out to stay alive.
It is the fear that is the toughest thing to deal with. The children were really frightened when it happened and Laksher, my four-year-old, is still scared that the waters will come again in the middle of the night.
Jason Burke
March: Magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck about 30 miles north of Tachileik on the Thai-Burma border
Human cost: At least 75 dead; more than 110 injured
Economic cost: Not yet known
Survivor's story: Sai Noom Khan (not his real name), 23, Tachileik
I was with my wife watching television when a loud knocking started suddenly. The room started to shake and all our photos fell off the wall. It was terrifying. I had never experienced an earthquake before.
I was worried the house would collapse, so I grabbed my wife by the hand and we ran. We ran outside, but the ground was shaking so much it was hard to stand up. It lasted only about 40 to 50 seconds.
We live on the top of the mountain, so there wasn't too much damage. Since the earthquake, everyone's been sleeping outside. It's cold, but we're too scared to sleep indoors.
Yesterday I visited the villages of Tarlay and Mong Lin, about 30 miles away. They were devastated. I was told more than 100 people died there.
Greg Lowe
Philippines floodsJanuary-March: Heavy rains continued from December last year
Human cost: At least 75 dead
Economic cost: £27m
Survivor's story: Ray Calleja, 43, hospital porter, Leyte Province
We lost everything. It was the morning of 17 March. I watched, helpless, as our home was taken away by the floods. The only reminder that our house stood there was a lonely post. This was the first time I've seen the waters that high. I'm 5ft 5in and the floodwaters could have easily swallowed me. My wife and I saved every peso so we could buy the things we need. But we couldn't take anything. We had to save ourselves. How will I have a house again? I'm 43, I earn P6,000 (£86) a month. That house cost us P30,000 (£430). When I saw everything we worked for all these years had disappeared, I cried.
Purple S Romero
January: Severe storms, lightning and floods
Human cost: 91 dead, 321 injured
Economic cost: £73m
Survivor's story: Amos Ndlovu, 47, unemployed painter, Diepsloot Township, Johannesburg
I've lived here for 10 years and this is the worst flooding I've known. There was heavy rain and I was afraid because I didn't even know where to put my kids. We couldn't open the front door because more water would come in, and it wasn't even safe to open the window.
We wanted to stay inside, but we could see the water was a metre high, so we used a hatch to climb on the roof – we waited there for four or five hours. It was raining hard. We couldn't run away because we had to look after our property.
That day was a disaster. Everything was washed away. Before the flood, we had power in the house, but now there is no electricity. Until they fix it, there's nothing we can do.
We are using candlelight and it will be cold in winter. I felt very sad. The most precious thing I lost was my car. It was stuck in mud and filled with water, and now it won't start. I'm not working at the moment and I don't have money, so I can't fix it.
It's nobody's fault, but I'm worried that it might happen again. The local government could do more to protect us. The system here is badly designed. If you build homes here, you must make a way for the water to run.
David Smith
71 Comments so far
Show All"First time in human history we can prevent a great deal of unnecessary cataclysm in the years ahead."
Hope so. Don't see many signs of it yet other than chatter on the net.
The children are said to be becoming aware and are the hope for the future. I hope there's enough time for them to do the job.
Seeing the problem as "consumer culture" - as a generalized problem of selfishness and greed - as well as seeing the problem as over-population, can never lead us to any solutions. Both of those are effects, not causes, and are self-correcting one way or another. Therefore, the problem is being described as though it were a solution, and advocating that we change either of those is not much different than advocating that the earth continue to revolve around the sun.
The crisis has been imposed upon us, it did not spring up magically from some mass consciousness that is flawed.
Such an odd thing - in response to this crisis human beings are advocating that there are too many human beings and that human beings should have less. Could there be any more clear illustration as to just how alienated and estranged people have become because of Capitalism?
TA, how do you see the crisis as being "imposed upon us"? Just wondering.
In the US, a lot of increased energy consumption and CO2 production is associated with increased air conditioning -- which in turn is associated with increased numbers of people moving to the desert southwest. I don't see how any of that was "imposed" upon the people who chose to move to Phoenix & Las Vegas & Albuquerque, and who chose to install air conditioning.
Moreover, even as per-capita energy use has declined significantly in the U.S. over the last several decades (see my post below), U.S. population has probably increased by at least the same amount -- so we're more or less back to where we started, energy-consumption wise. Ignore the impacts of population growth at your peril.
If the solution is not fewer people and/or less energy consumption, thenwhat do you suggest? My state has made a concerted move toward more sustainable, green energy production, with some notable success ... until this year, when the new Republican majority has started rolling back many of those successes.
(I know -- I should never say anything good about the Democratic Party. But in my state, they have actually done many good things. Especially given the Republican alternative, which is always business-as-usual. Or worse.)
The people of the U.S. are definitely not to blame for the sorry state of things. If they have "bought in" to commercial culture it's because it has been made so pervasive that few other options are available that don't involve poverty, deprivation, risk, and discomfort. "Dropping out" and trying to form a counter culture with humane values was ultimately unsustainable.
Citizens and residents of the United States are anything but "lazy, greedy, and stupid" as some on this site sometimes say. They work longer hours with less time off than the whole rest of the developed world. They aren't stupid -- stupid people are what they are. Instead many (certainly not all) United Statesians are ignorant which is different from being stupid and means they could get educated if someone can figure out how to get them to listen and learn. It's hard not to be greedy when the whole economic system works by constantly propagandizing people to want stuff and buy stuff. Yet still, a surprising number of them go into the helping professions such as nursing and social work. Those people don't get much media because telling their stories doesn't feed into the "get them to the malls with their credit cards" way of economic life. The whole thing needs to be revised from top to bottom, but where to begin, where to begin.
TwoA:
Absolutely true except maybe the "self correcting" part, and I hope that's true.
A couple weeks ago, you posted a list of labor killings in American history with dates and netlinks. If you can, would you repost a link to that page. Please.
Funny, but I always thought that a fair distribution of resources was the solution to the problem. Everyone knows poor people have more children (except for religious nuts, who proliferate like rabbits because their god tells them to do it) - the solution is to eliminate poverty. Spread the wealth, and condemn those who flaunt it - take it away from people so paranoid and deranged that they'll never have 'enough' - and make sure everyone has the basic necessities of life.
It isn't about ideology - capitalism, socialism, or whatever - it is about priorities.
The 'conservative' mantra I was taught: make sure the poor have enough and they won't be forced to steal from you just to survive. If you take more than you need, you are stealing from someone else. Enlightened self-interest: the better your community (society) fares, the better you will fare. And NEVER blame the victim unless you've walked in his shoes.
And you have, armybrat, stated why I find true conservative people to be on target, and not necessarily a Repub or Dem, or Jew or Catholic, just righteous with good priorities people. We do all have a common ground, and it resides in the very statement you made.
Thank you.
Some news from grist.org:
"Here's what that EIA comparison showed about the change in household energy use from 1978 to 2005, when expressed in per capita terms:
* Total household energy use per person: down 25 percent.
* Space-heating energy use per person: down 54 percent.
* Water-heating energy use per person: up 4 percent.
* Air-conditioning energy use per person: up 107 percent.
* Appliances and electronics energy use per person: up 38 percent.
"Space heating and water heating together are a very big part of the picture: 80 percent of all household energy use in 1978, 61 percent in 2005. Air conditioning, though growing rapidly, is much smaller: 3 percent in 1978, 8 percent in 2005. So the fact that space heating went way down and water heating barely changed meant that overall household energy use per person went down, not up."
So ... there is a little bit of positive news out here. It would be interesting to see the 2009-2010-2011 figures, which I suspect look even better.
Not that anybody on the CD web site ever likes to hear anything that resembles optimistic news, no matter how mildly optimistic that may be: it usually ruins their pessimist day.
Such a lie. Those who disagree with you are positive about different things than you are.
What you mean is that many here are not positive about good news for the wealthy and powerful. You, on the other hand, are not positive about good news for the working class.
So you don't think that reduced greenhouse-gas production and associated reduction in global warming will be good for the working class -- or for the millions of poor around the world who live only a few feet above sea level?
"Not that anybody on the CD web site ever likes to hear anything that resembles optimistic news, no matter how mildly optimistic that may be: it usually ruins their pessimist day."
-- And how do you suppose that your over-generalized, demeaning and prejudiced paragraph is any better than those you choose to scorn? I mean, by all means, please do spread the love and the positive... but maybe next time try leaving out the scornful attitude.
Sorry. I'll admit was maybe a little bit over the top. But it has been my experience.
Forgive me if I'm cranky. Every time I've tried to share even mildly positive news on this site in the past, I've gotten slammed down for being naive and a Tool of the Capitalist Propaganda Machine.
I've also noticed the almost disappearance of other "positive news" posters on this web site (they really DID used to be here, but they've pretty much been chased away).
Complaining is good -- there's plenty to complain about in today's world. But perpetually complaining without proposing solutions is just a waste of time.
The thing about CDers is that the good news isn't nearly good enough for us, and it's really not nearly good enough to solve the problems we face. When we watch the world being destroyed in a one step forward, five steps back fashion, we feel little reason to cheer. I'll have to think about it. I fear optimism and cheeriness. It's not exactly appropriate to the situation.
Thank you. Well put.
"I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."
Antonio Gramsci
some weeks back a radio report stated that "optimists live longer."
at least they like to think they will...
I'm pretty sure that Malcolm X, Mahatma Gandhi, Margaret Mead, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King were as successful as they were because of their deeply-rooted pessimism that nothing would ever change.
Oh please ! If you do not like it here, then just go to another site where you will be "happy" such as Fluffpost, Dkos, or even Alternet where you can enjoy your time with the Obamabots and the Democrat Party apologists doing their phoney "happy" talk as if the nation is "improving" even when it continues to sink in quicksand ! Yes, it may come off as too much "pessimism" to you but it would be better to face the truth rather than be blissfully ignorant.
The truth is that your parents, relatives, friends, children and you will die. In 100 years nearly everyone on the planet alive today will be dead, 6 billion. Then the Sun burns out and Earth dies. Not much room for optimism yet many are. Why?
We may have good reasons to be pessimistic. However, your exploiting our pessimism to make matters worse is wrong.
JenniferBedingfield,
What's your opinion of this site: www.thinkprogress.org
I am starting to look at it. It would be nice if it were not so political. Of all the progressive sites I have been too, this one is the least political of them all. I used to enjoy Alternet and while I got my access back after they corrected the "glitch" I suppose, I get bored of the same old cheesy talk on that site, more so among the Obamabots. This site seems to be my favorite despite people reporting getting banned in the past.
P.S.: I am also going beyond the American sites and looking for European forums and maybe some in other parts of the world where progressive thinking is alive and well. :)
I highly enjoy reading through the comments posted on that site. They got a snarky sense of humor.
Thinkprogress or Alternet ??
It is only half the story. You have to also look at transportation and food consumption and population growth. Increased energy efficiency in something is trumped by an increase in population.
Then you can also look at wasted energy from things such as war fighting and disasters from ever more risky energy production practices. How much oil is now going to be diverted to cleaning up Chernobyl or Fukushima?
RE: Donny-Don Apr 2 2011 - 1:27pm "Some news from grist.org"
To start with, I find your condescending generalization of CD'ers somewhat insulting, and would suggest that instead of trying to justify it, you just say sorry and leave it at that. That said -- none of us are perfect, and your point has some validity, so you are forgiven.
As to statistics (and polls) -- they are funny things. You can pretty much make them say whatever you like. So...
1) One EIA statistic not mentioned is that "total energy use in all U.S. homes occupied as primary residences decreased slightly from 10.58 quads in 1978 to 10.55 quads in 2005" -- barely keeping us even considering population growth, and note the exclusion of secondary residences (the rich). I agree that this is better than if it had increased in the same proportion as population, but the overall picture still looks pretty bleak for our planet -- at least to me. Less bleak? Yes! I guess where we differ is shown in other posts of yours. You seem to believe in voting for and supporting the lesser of two evils, whereas I believe in voting and living my conscience. To each his own -- and correct me if I am wrong.
2) It is true that much of the gains made in energy usage is the result of more efficient homes, furnaces, windows, and appliances, but there is absolutely no accounting for the energy used to replace all of the aforementioned items -- mainly because we live in a consumer oriented society with a throwaway mentality, and our mantra is economic growth at any and all costs to society and this planet. However, to reduce residential energy usage without taking into consideration the increased industrial energy usage required to accomplish this is somewhat disingenuous.
3) Another statistic somewhat glossed over is that the size of households has declined, meaning more houses are being constructed for a given number of people. Population growth aside, for just this one factor we have neglected to take into consideration the additional cost to this planet for production of concrete that goes into all of this new construction, asphalt for roads -- not to mention the other consequences of the paving over of America, destruction of wetlands as we develop the coastal areas, destruction of old growth forests world wide for our obscenely huge houses with vaulted ceilings in every room and redwood decks around the entire perimeter, the overflowing landfills pouring methane into the atmosphere, and on and on and on.
The bottom line is that we are destroying this planet at an ever increasing rate and no statistics can hide that. My heart breaks when I look at what has happened to the south Jersey seashore where I grew up, where all of the blueberry bogs and marshlands were dredged and turned into developments so every house could be built on a lagoon, and the once pristine ocean beaches are now polluted and fenced in. I spent many a childhood afternoon sitting on the "dock of the bay" with my grandfather crabbing, and picking blueberries in the summer and selling them door to door. A time long past...
4) I also did not see where any accounting was taken for actual climate change over the years in question. If the climate warmed substantially over the same period of time -- as we know it has, then it would follow that energy usage for heat would have declined by a corresponding amount.
5) Finally, much of the reduction in heating cost is related to the movement of our population from the frigid north to the more mild southern states, and from the interior of the country to coastal areas where climate is somewhat moderated by the oceans. As the population of the Great Lakes rust-belt states and the northeast decline, one would expect to see a huge decline in energy usage for heating -- especially considering the antiquated heating systems that were still in use in much of the northern industrial states in 1978.
However, it is not just the actual temperature differential in moving from a colder climate to a warmer climate that has played a role in the reduction of heating, it is also the corresponding change in fuels used and the equipment used to burn those fuels.
For example, most heating systems in the northern states originally used coal fired cast iron boilers in conjunction with cast iron steam radiators. In the 50's and 60's most of these boilers were converted from coal to fuel oil. I know this because my father had a fuel oil business in Newark, NJ for his entire life, and we actually did many of these conversions when I was a kid. Later the cast iron radiators were replaced with baseboard hot water heaters and the old previously converted cast iron boilers were replaced with more modern fuel oil furnaces, and finally many systems were converted to or replaced with natural gas systems -- hot water or forced air -- as that fuel became more available.
There were also many old tenement buildings in the old days without any central heating system whatsoever, where each apartment or room was heated with a small inefficient kerosene heater, and the windows often left open to vent the fumes. I trudged up many flights of stairs as a kid in these old brick buildings with a five-gallon can of kerosene in each hand. My knees cringe at the thought...
My point here is that as the population shifted southward and toward the coasts, most of the old houses with horribly inefficient heating systems were simply torn down, while their newly constructed counterparts in the sunbelt used cleaner, more efficient fuels and heating systems -- not to mention requiring less heat. I imagine most of the older buildings that are still left standing these days in the northern cities are vacant and in disrepair. I know for a fact that where my father had his business in the ghetto of Newark, all of the old tenement housing was torn down years ago, starting after the riots, and replaced with more modern public housing. Maybe someone who still lives in these areas could enlighten me.
In closing, I do not dispute that we are making improvements in some areas of energy usage -- but I have serious concerns regarding the unspoken costs. For example, while we use less energy with compact fluorescent lights, we have the problem of toxic heavy metals and disposal. And so it goes with everything. Nuclear isn't just about earthquakes and tsunami's -- it is about everything from the mining to the transport to the disposal.
It has always been my contention that of the troika 'Reduce, Recycle, Reuse', the most important by far is REDUCE!!!
In Peace
VOR
Peace Is Not A Season -- It Is A Way Of Life
I apologize for the length of my post above. It is so easy to get carried away, and I barely even scratched the surface of what I was thinking.
VOR
the Tokyo governor...declared that the earthquake/tsunami/ reactor tripleheader was "divine punishment"
is the Emperor still divine???
Climate change-caused floods and landslide examples next to earthquakes does not compute. Maybe science will find an earthquake-climate change connection. Is it possible that warming seas can have an effect on the tectonic plates that have been kept frozen and stable on their surfaces?
I also wonder as peak oil is here, if the oil didn't act as a cushion, rather like hydraulic fluid, in ways I and others don't understand yet. Now that more than half is gone, is it affecting the layers of the earth? Is oil the "blood" or "lymph" of that macro- organism some believe Gaiea to be? I'm beginning to think we won't survive to find out, one way or the other.
I've often wondered similar things. Like what happens that we don't know when all the oil is pumped out. If it was a puff pastry filled with something gooey and good, and it got sucked out, wouldn't the pastry then collapse? Or are we suffocating the earth with all of our concrete and sprawling cities? How much free space does the earth need to continue breathing normally? What happens if it can't? Will there be a nuclear chain reaction one day when a natural disaster occurs setting off nuclear reactors and other nuclear stuff, and it continues around the world, could it cause the earth to split?
I wonder where the sun goes at night...
Good observation. But I'm not sure if Japan has that much oil under it
Belief in something by a large number of people is not evidence of truth. Is this article meant to represent a rational thought process? It seems all we get from the so called media today are fearful negative stories of human failure. The problems we are dealing with today are in part caused by the fact that are so successful as a species. We were told to go forth and multiply and we did. How are we to exist if we don't consume? Now we have displeased our creator once again. Maybe omniscience is not what it's cracked up to be. How is it that the things humans do are outside of nature? When God or nature took away our claws and fangs and replaced them with our " big" brain and opposable thumb technological development was our only path. We are children intellectuality immature playing with dangerous toys. We have populated the planet consumed massive amounts and developed powerful technologies. Yet stubbornly we remain ignorant and superstitious. We have been told that the answers come from our leaders, teachers,and experts. Teach your children, challenge authority, study history. Buy locally, have meaningful conversations with your children, neighbors, and co-workers. We the people need to find a new path forward. Continue to wallow in fear and superstition, or find a new way. We are being sold a bill of goods and the big kahuna is displeased.
I like your advice !!!
Iwonder...I think what McKibben was doing here was bringing you the human side of disaster, to witness first hand vicariously, of the way it feels. Yes, we are consumers, yes, maybe some are out of hand. Your biological progression of humans seems a bit flawed, claws? fangs?
We are still ignorant and superstitious, meaning the same thing, we continue on the path of denial because of fear. Then we become angry because our ego pride makes us say we aren't afraid and that we are in control. We aren't in control in any way what so ever and that is the ultimate ignorance of an arrogant ego in denial.
We need to seek and ingest ultimate reality.
I've been concerned about this issue even since I saw Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and remember his book "Earth in the Balance" at least 30 years ago. My brother was a Nuclear physicist who worked on the first Nautilus sub, then started to design power plants, but quit when he became convinced they would not be safe. He went to work for a company in Cal. in 1979 doing consulting for Alternative Energy. Unfortunately, he succumbed to cancer in a few months, but the Three Mile Island melted down in March before he died in June. His wife died in three years from leukemia and several of their children have had forms of cancer.
I have been amazed at how some of my children deny global warming, or "climate change" or whatever. When you see or experience disasters the worst in 100 or 1000 years, wouldn't you think they would notice? (One of them lives in Nashville, where they describe their flood last year as a '1000' year event.) And, not mentioned above, but in 2008, in Burma (Myanmar) the Nargis hurricane killed 140,000 people, while their government stopped other countries from entering with food and help. The government gave out the list of pigs, cows and chickens killed.....
The author is right - these "natural" disasters, like BP, etc., are happening with our cooperation and noninterest. As Einstein himself said "The splitting of the
atom changed everything save man's mode of thinking; thus we drift toward
unparalled disaster."
I've been concerned about this issue even since I saw Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and remember his book "Earth in the Balance" at least 30 years ago. My brother was a Nuclear physicist who worked on the first Nautilus sub, then started to design power plants, but quit when he became convinced they would not be safe. He went to work for a company in Cal. in 1979 doing consulting for Alternative Energy. Unfortunately, he succumbed to cancer in a few months, but the Three Mile Island melted down in March before he died in June. His wife died in three years from leukemia and several of their children have had forms of cancer.
I have been amazed at how some of my children deny global warming, or "climate change" or whatever. When you see or experience disasters the worst in 100 or 1000 years, wouldn't you think they would notice? (One of them lives in Nashville, where they describe their flood last year as a '1000' year event.) And, not mentioned above, but in 2008, in Burma (Myanmar) the Nargis hurricane killed 140,000 people, while their government stopped other countries from entering with food and help. The government gave out the list of pigs, cows and chickens killed.....
The author is right - these "natural" disasters, like BP, etc., are happening with our cooperation and noninterest. As Einstein himself said "The splitting of the
atom changed everything save man's mode of thinking; thus we drift toward
unparalled disaster."
Yes Mr Gore is a good example of our current leadership. We should heed his sage advice and stop driving and heating our homes. This will allow Mr Gore to continue to deliver his inconvenient message via private jet and stretch limo. Mr Gore needs his massive carbon footprint you don't. Stretch limo for them moped for you. Get it . And by the way, I"m sure you won't mind paying your coming carbon tax to be collected by Mr Gore and his ilk.The current power structure in this country is corrupt and rotten to the core. Don't believe a word they say.
I tied into this 20 years ago. Alan Thicke was on tv one day talking up Al Gore and being deliberate in recycling etc. I was thinking to myself, "This show is taped in NYC and you live in LA. Who's watching the mansion? Do you think Conchita is counting the trashbags she's using while she cleans your house? Doubt it." The next time he was on a few month later, he was conducting a tour of his recently renovated house. The before pictures were gorgeous. He proceeds to tell Baba Waba how he HAD to completely gut the interior to put fiber optic carpet throughout the place so his floor would twinkle like the night sky. And he wanted me to give up disposable diapers for road trips.
Whenever I see some article criticizing Al Gore about his book and movie Inconvenient Truth, I find it hard to stomach. Here's the only American in history to have demonstrably been denied the US Presidency he won, and he found a way to deal with that situation in good humor as the guy "who used to be the next President of the United States".
I saw him at the service held after the 9/11 Twin Towers attack and it was so obvious the man was IN SHOCK. He must have wondered at that moment whether he would have actually wanted to be in the Oval Office or not. After the continual beating up by neocons, and the unprecedented injustice he'd just gone through, he decided to withdraw from politics and try to do something else with his life. People wanted him to run, but why should he run again for the office that was already rightfully his? Why put up with all the meanness that has come to American political life in the last 2 or 3 decades?
I see and sense goodness and decency in that man, and hate to see him being continually dragged through the coals. I have read his book and have seen his movie. People who criticize these have to account for all the before and after pictures that show plenty of evidence for the things he says are happening to the earth. Maybe they contend that all the images were photoshopped. Maybe they don't know that Glacier National Park used to have 150 glaciers and is currently down to 25.
Here's a man who is genuinely concerned about the earth changes going on, who has demonstrably had the Presidency stolen from him. The Supreme Ct stopped the Florida vote count, and that sad decision cannot be undone, must stand for all time in disgrace in the annals of American history, unless such history is rewritten by certain factions like in Orwell's 1984.
All I can ask is this main question: What do you expect, anyway? Here's a man who is genuinely concerned about the earth changes going on, who has had the Presidency stolen from him. What do you expect him to do about his genuine concerns if he can't find some business model to function on? Clinton left office with a budget surplus in place. Gore might well have continued that trend. We'll never know, will we? People who want to punish Gore some more, don't you think maybe he's had enough already?
I am sorry but Gore is no environmentalist at heart even though he may have written a book or two on the environment. He never used his political power to push for strong labor unions or a healthy environment and Ronnie Raygun and his gang messed it all up. In fact, Gore has been shilling for Big Coal/Nuclear buying into that "clean coal" and "safe nuclear" nonsense. Gore should have gotten out of the way in 2000 so that Nader would have won.
First I remember that we have some of the most technologically richest governments in human history. They have vast engineering and robotic resources at their command.
Some of us have governments that prepare for a 10,000 year event (the Netherlands believes that they have built their seawalls that high). Others of us have "Heckuva good job, Brownie" disaster preparedness plans that rather smell of political corruption sometimes. The bottom of the barrel governments have sacrificed their people by the thousands to the god of political corruption.
If we want disaster preparedness, and if we want to inhibit and then reverse climate change, then we need more honest governments.
Most of the decisions that impact the environment on a grand scale are made in the board room not in the living room. Consumers respond very well when asked to change their behaviors to limit impact to the environment. The big boys and their parasites, not so much.
We must force existing governments to be honest; wating for another "honest" government to arise is magical thinking. If we don't start revolting against those currently in power (Obama, Hillary, Scott Walker, and Rick Scott-my governor) then we will never "get" an honest government. It may and probably take a revolution of soem kind to make these corporate shills do for us the people. And yes we must face the fact that population growth is a big part of the ecological problem. The earth can only sustain so many of us, and the more of us there are the more we demand from her in resources; so like it or not we must begin to factor in population as part of the environmental problem.
Haleatus...spot on
The best way to control the population is to share the wealth. We have enough resources (for now) but we don't have a sustainable distribution - either we clean up all the governments and insure that everyone has the basics, or we will be over-run. Rabbits die off, what, every 7 years? There are natural constraints on any population - except humans. What other species hordes resources that will never be used - or in the case of India, for instance, will spoil before they can be used. People starving while stores of grain rot - that's unconsiounable. And India claims to be the world's largest democracy? What kind of bull-crap is that?
End corruption - re-instate the progressive taxes of the 'good old days' - like 96% top brackets - and a lot of problems will resolve themselves. (Getting rid of 'corporate personhood' is also near the top of my list.) Share or die - enlightened self-interest is the key. (Along with smaller, more manageable countries.)
Start frowning at anyone gaudy or extravagant - show disgust at large houses, large vehicles, and any other sort of exhibitionism. People with inferiority complexes seem to need material things to make up for their personal inadequacies - let others know what you think. Talk about it with your friends, neighbors, and family - it's OUR problem, after all.
"There are natural constraints on any population - except humans"
There are natural constraints on humans too. Food, water, population density.
"What other species hordes resources that will never be used - or in the case of India, for instance, will spoil before they can be used. People starving while stores of grain rot - that's unconsiounable. And India claims to be the world's largest democracy? What kind of bull-crap is that"
Actually hoarding food is meant to prevent people starving, in the event of bad weather, fires, etc ,suddenly reducing the availability of food, dramatically increasing the price of food. Maybe instead of whining about bull crap, you should think first?
Sigh, disasters will pile on and continue. Yet, we will continue to guzzle away at those fossil and nuclear fuels like there is no tomorrow. Are we even remembering last year's disasters today? We never learn. :(
"Natural Disasters?
Floods, earthquakes, landslides: 2011 is a year of disasters. Bill McKibben asks: are we to blame? Plus, survivors tell their tales"
While a good article, one factor McKibben fails to mention is the fact that humankind's size has doubled in the last half century - from 3.5 bn in the early 1960'ies to 7 bn now. This means more exposure to natural disasters, particularly those concerning water, as humans to a large extent live by the seaside and waterways. Double our numbers, double the casualties.
Another salient factor is that humankind (or not so kind) is still very much learning to integrate our interaction with our surroundings - on all levels, interpersonal, interspecies and interaction with nature. Even our interaction with ourselves individually through time we're not - I admit - very good at.
We're on a steep learning curve with a slow assimilation gradient. Such learning happening too slowly to keep up with the changes we cause, generates problems.
Learning to comprehend interaction as another variable - even a meta-variable - in the facts we reckon with, also necessitates knowing ourselves to a more complete degree. Living in denial and superficiality negates the "intuition" (our currently best available term for relating all of ourselves to all of our surroundings) a holistic approach demands. Our exclusions exclude integrating much of the interactions we perform at all times.
There are clear lawfulnesses and regularities to human interaction and intra-action (actions toward ourselves individually, impacting our subsequent perceptions of our actions). No psycho-babble or pop-psychology can cope with these circularities. We need staunchly scientific approaches. Even as far as being of a scientific mind toward our subjective minds and mental spins.
The line: "Little does she know that I know that she knows that I know she's cheating on me" (Kursaal Fyers, 1976) - is a funny example of attempts to cope with this kind of circular interaction. How we ourselves react, or not, during such interactions obviously impacts the outcome.
As a similar interpersonal example, a guy told of how he'd been privy to his girlfriend's escalating cheating, because she obviously was oblivious to the fact that his administrator's privileges on their shared computer ensured that her email-flirting with another guy hit his inbox on a regular basis - without him even prying. The guy only leaned back and let it happen as the relationship grew more intimate, saving the exchange for "evidence" against her. That's one way to go. Another might've been to grip into his own honesty - hard as that always is on an ego as firmly entrenched as our regular western kind currently is - and find a way of constructively confront her. And maybe that way save their relationship, e.g. to the benefit of their child - and themselves.
But in a consumer-society such as ours, even personal relationships have become 'disposable'. Yet it was only half a century ago that breaking the personal 'contract' of an intimate relationship was considered scandalous. It seems we've gone too far in liberating ourselves from our basic relationships - of all kinds.
That last anecdote appears disastrously parallel to humanity's relationship to both the humanmade and natural environment at this point. We're in the "evidence-gathering"-phase. But our relationship with the natural or man-made surroundings isn't quite that 'disposable' (at least not to us - though we ourselves may be disposable, to the planet).
Deeper honesty - much deeper - toward ourselves (individually, groupwise, society-wide and globally) in order to better understand our surroundings, and "save" our relationship with our environment of all kinds, is in fact the main method for comprehending and coming to grips with the laws of regularity for the circular effects we cause.
Recognizing that we come from the biosphere and are on our way back to the biosphere, is a good place to start. "Dust to dust" we know - but what happens in between is the part of the cycle that needs deeper and shared acknowledgement.
That sharing of acknowledgment is big part of the circles we're in.
Whatever we come from, a certain humility based on the recognition that "I don't come from me" opens up to an introspective approach that is very liberating, too, and causes surprising insights into the enigma of "Where do 'I' - this 'me-feeling' - subjectively come from, then?"
"I come from the biosphere," is certainly true for our bodies. Scaling that fact down to every conscious thought we have and make ("have and make" - a small circle right there!) is such a huge and intriguing project, that religious explanations for the origin of consciousness can safely be put on hold as - at least - temporarily irrelevant.
Who cares if a part of consciousness originates with a foggy concept of divinity and whether that's being jewish or hindu or greek or whatever, when floods are knocking the walls down?
Better look for easier methods for coping at that - this - time. Like recognizing the impact of humanity increasing at the speed of about 3 people every second, some 240,000 every day, and be humble enough to limit ourselves to living on safer ground (in every sense) than exposing ourselves to tempestous surroundings partly of our own making.
So let's get a grip - on US.